Former President Donald Trump’s plan to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” has significant support from swing voters and the country’s white working class, who are most important to Trump’s victory in this year’s presidential election.
A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted this week found widespread support for deporting “all” of the 11 million to 22 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the U.S.: 62% of registered voters said they would support such a deportation effort.
WATCH — Lindsey Graham: “President Trump will deport tens of thousands of illegal aliens on his first day in office.”
But what’s important is the widespread support for mass deportations among the two electoral groups most important to Trump’s reelection: swing voters and white working-class voters.
Both voting groups helped Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton to become president in 2016 and helped him win all but two of the Rust Belt states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. To repeat 2016, Trump will need both groups to win over those states again.
With his mass deportation plan, President Trump would win the support of about six in 10 swing voters and possibly disenfranchised Democrats, while roughly four in 10 support the plan.
Aside from political ideological groups, working-class whites, who are more likely to compete with illegal immigrants for scarce blue-collar jobs, are the most supportive of Trump’s deportation plans.
WATCH — Rubio: I support mass deportations. We need to do something dramatic to get rid of illegal immigrants:
Among white Americans without a college degree, 74 percent support the deportation plan, while only 26 percent oppose it. Among white Americans with a college degree, nearly 6 in 10 support the plan, while 42 percent oppose it.
After the 2016 presidential election, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver detail It shows how the white working class determined Trump’s victory and how the electoral strength of this historically less motivated voter group shifted dramatically in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“In the 10 states with the highest share of white voters without a college degree, Trump beat the poll average by an average of 8 percentage points, a major polling outlier,” Silver writes. “…Overall, there is a fairly strong correlation between a state’s share of white voters without a college degree and the percentage by which Trump beat the poll.”
The CBS/YouGov poll was conducted June 5-7 among more than 1,600 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter. here.
